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Surviving “Amour”

I almost didn’t make it through “Amour,” which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film on Sunday. It wasn’t that I wasn’t prepared: I knew what the movie was about and, having seen several other of Michael Haneke’s movies and read about his work, was familiar with his sadistic tendencies as a filmmaker. “Depressing” was the word used by everyone I spoke to about the film, but depressing has never been a descriptor that puts me off; it’s rare that a movie, even an aggressively tragic one, depresses me. More often, I find myself simply fascinated, and even delighted, by the range of emotions cinema can capture.

But “Amour” depressed me. It depressed me to the point that my chest felt tight, that fat tears streamed down my face as I struggled to keep my shoulders from heaving too noticeably. It depressed me to the point that I seriously contemplated escaping to the bathroom to have it out and collect myself, and considered leaving the theatre altogether. (The only thing that stopped me, or from releasing audible, convulsive sobs, beyond respect for my fellow moviegoers, was the fact that I was sitting next to my boyfriend and his parents, whom I was only meeting for the second time, and whom I did not want to think I was a basket case.)

The moment I began to spiral was during a scene about a third of the way through the film: Anne, the wife in the elderly couple around which the story revolves, has progressed to the stage of her post-stroke state when, though her mind remains sharp, her motor skills have started to fail her; in the bathroom, she calls for her husband, Georges, and he helps her up from the toilet, pulling up her underwear as she stares over his shoulder with a look of stony resignation. I felt my throat constrict as my mind flashed to an image—imagined—of my paternal grandparents in the months before my grandfather’s death from congestive heart failure, three years ago. I pictured them shuffling in the dark down the beige-carpeted hall that led from their bedroom to the bathroom, my grandmother bending under his bony, fragile frame.

Later, when Anne, upon returning home from the hospital, made Georges promise she’d never have to go back, I thought of my grandfather’s room in the geriatrics ward—of how we’d read the newspaper together on the edge of the bed he would die in, the bed my grandmother convinced the nurses to let her crawl into to sleep beside him. She’d insisted he be admitted, despite the fact there was nothing any doctor could do: for Anne and Georges, the ultimate act of love was Georges allowing and even expediting Anne’s death, but for my grandparents, it was my grandfather allowing my grandmother to try to keep him alive. I felt ill as I remembered the day of his funeral, at the sprawling maze of a cemetery in New Jersey where he and three of his five siblings had purchased plots decades earlier. He was the last to be buried there. I had to look away as my grandmother climbed into the back of the hearse and, dizzy with grief, knelt over the coffin she had begged the funeral director to open, so she could talk to his body one last time. I thought about her now: I always knew she would dissolve when he died, but I had not foreseen that her grief would sustain itself, essentially undiminished, for years. That she would transform into a person I often barely recognize.

My grandfather was ninety-seven when he died, and he and my grandmother were deeply in love until the very end. She was his second wife, seventeen years his junior. His first wife, my biological grandmother, died of an undiagnosed brain aneurysm (her clueless doctor told her, as she slowly lost her mind, that she was going through menopause) in 1964, and my father has said that my grandfather might have died from heartbreak if he hadn’t remarried just three years later. I grew up acutely aware of how tenderly he and my grandmother felt toward each other, especially in comparison to my maternal grandparents, who seemed to be constantly bickering and never displaying affection. Like Anne and Georges, who seem to genuinely enjoy each other’s company—smiling dreamily as they ride the bus together after a concert, sharing breakfast in their perfectly lived-in Paris apartment—my paternal grandparents’ marital bliss seemed only strengthened with time. They called each other Poopsie (her) and Pip Pip (him). They kissed. They held hands. They gave each other foot rubs, and scratched each other’s backs. Every year before Valentine’s Day, my grandfather went down to his drafting table in the basement and constructed an elaborate card, often featuring cut-out photos of their heads pasted onto the hand-drawn bodies of cherubs; after the holiday, his efforts would be hung somewhere in the house for posterity—in the laundry room, the inside of a closet door. Every evening before dinner, my grandmother fixed two bourbons in round metal tumblers, to drink with peanuts or popcorn as they sat close on the couch in the den, watching the news.

As they aged and weakened physically, taking scary tumbles down stairs and off curbs, my father, his two siblings, and their respective spouses urged my grandparents to sell their two-story suburban house; to stop driving; to acknowledge the fact that they were old. They refused. And though I worried about them (when my grandfather fell from a chair trying to replace a lightbulb, when my grandmother missed an exit on the parkway and shifted the car into reverse), I took their side. I understood that their situation was impractical, but I also felt a deep conviction that they should be able to live exactly as they saw fit. They were happy and they were, against many odds, in love. Just because they were old didn’t mean they’d reverted to childhood. They shouldn’t be forced into assisted living, where they’d be babied and patronized by aides. One of the most powerful moments of “Amour” comes after Georges fires an in-home nurse who treats Anne like a toddler. In the next scene, Georges tries to get Anne to drink some tea, which she rejects. He becomes so frustrated that he slaps her sharply across the face. It’s a shocking, heart-wrenching moment that’s open for interpretation, but, to me, what it ultimately betrays is that, to him, she’s still very much an adult—his equal, capable of driving him to passionate anger. You do not slap a toddler across the face, but you might slap a lover.

Though my grandparents loved their children, in the end they didn’t care what they thought. In “Amour,” Anne and Georges’s daughter, Eva, is portrayed almost as their enemy, and at the very least an outsider. They seem to have a good, loving relationship with her, but they don’t want her meddling in their lives. This—the idea of a couple’s relationship with their child playing such clear second fiddle to their relationship with each other—struck me as very and appealingly French: romance over all else. It reminded me, too, of Ayelet Waldman’s controversial 2005 “Modern Love” column in the New York Times, in which she unequivocally and unapologetically states that she loves her husband, the novelist Michael Chabon, more than her children. She would choose him over them if it came down to it, she said, and couldn’t imagine experiencing joy without him.

But my sadness arose from how close to home “Amour” hit: this was how much my grandparents had loved each other. The sad fate that Anne and Georges were meeting onscreen was the fate that my grandparents had met. I had known that it was happening at the time, and I had witnessed it to some degree, but Haneke brought me so close to its nucleus I almost felt I was experiencing it myself. “Life is so long,” says Anne contentedly, as she and Georges flip through an old photo album. As I sat crying in the movie theatre, I realized that if I was lucky enough to say the same, and lucky enough to find love that lasted, I would be unlucky enough to see it end.